43 Forward, “An Introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories”
43 Forward, “An Introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories”
The Garden Party and Other Stories was published in 1922, the year before Katherine Mansfield’s untimely death from tuberculosis. An anonymous detractor in the English Review declared it to be ‘cruel, passionless and cynical’; however, in July 1922 Robert Littell acknowledged Mansfield’s ‘genius’, enthusing about her ability to evoke moods and feelings: ‘She is a connoisseur of the ripples that mean so much more than waves, a collector of little emotions caught on the wing, never pinned or bottled in her pages, but kept alive there in all their fragile iridescent colours’.[1]
Recently, Claire Tomalin has described Mansfield as ‘an original, both in her technique as a writer and the way she chose to live her life; a modernist, an innovator, an experimenter’.[2] Other notable critics have assessed her contribution to literary modernism,[3] and Clare Hanson has also argued persuasively that the central concerns of Mansfield’s fiction ‘resonate powerfully with the landscape opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis’.[4]
The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Front cover to the first edition of The Garden Party and Other Stories, 1922.
Mansfield’s style
Modernist authors distanced themselves from their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. Repudiating traditional third-person omniscient narration, they preferred to represent characters through their shifting thoughts, memories and sensations. Mansfield’s stories were regarded as the first in the English language to bear the influence of Chekhov. She also credited visual art’s impact on her prose technique, declaring that Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings ‘taught me something about writing which was queer – a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free’. Furthermore Mansfield compared her story ‘Miss Brill’ to a piece of music, explaining in a letter of 17 January 1921: ‘I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence. I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her.’ One art form could be used to inspire another, as Gerri Kimber has explained: Mansfield’s stories ‘grow from pieces of music, pictures, poems, and architectural details. Cinema techniques are transposed back into writing, theatrical monologues and dialogues are re-mediatised as prose’.[5]
Rhythm: art, music, literature, No. IV
Katherine Mansfield’s early stories were published in the modernist magazine Rhythm: art, music, literature (1911–13).
Mansfield’s journal entry for January 1916 states: ‘The plots of my stories leave me perfectly cold.’ They tend to begin at the heart of a situation, without preamble (although flashbacks and reflection feature), and frequently they end abruptly. Primarily, Mansfield is concerned with the psychology of her characters, many of whom are isolated, frustrated and disillusioned. She moves between them, using focalisation and free indirect speech to communicate their thoughts. Of